


Point of Intersection

by Fluff Trash (MINYFEELSKITTEN)



Category: Supernatural, destiel - Fandom
Genre: M/M, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-11
Packaged: 2018-04-03 14:11:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4103782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MINYFEELSKITTEN/pseuds/Fluff%20Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>High school Supernatual AU. In this timeline, both Mary and Sam died in the fire in Lawrence, leaving the remaining Winchesters riddled with guilt and without anyone to seek revenge upon. Dean grows up to be a very troubled 17 year old boy on the verge of collapse. He is searching for an angel that haunts his dreams, but he doesn't find who he was looking for. Instead, he meets the boy who seemed to have fallen from the heavens into his B-block free period- he calls himself Castiel. Boom. Feelings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One - Lawrence

**Author's Note:**

> (This is a finished 50,000 word fic. I will be posting a new chapter pretty regularly. The first one starts off slow, so just stick around until Cas shows up!)

Dean’s tears were poison, so he never cried.

Instead, he drew lines. He drew lines wherever he saw them, with his feet, with his eyes, with his hands, and with his mind. He drew paths on carpets and he underlined invisible words on chalkboards. He traced scratches on his wrists and covered them up with the soft sleeve of his hoodie.

All of Dean’s lines were straight and unbroken, from the point when they started to the point when they stopped, and they never touched with any others. He was careful in the hallways to step on tiles he was sure no one had walked on in a while, and he weaved in little segments through the paths that others left behind.

And Dean was sad, and he drew lines over his lips to seal them shut, and he kept on living as time kept on passing, in a straight line. That was until he met the angle.

She swerved and curled and somersaulted, spinning in whirling dervishes all across the earth, and one day she spun her way into Dean. She came twirling into his arms, bending all the straight lines into loops and curves that reflected the sunshine on all sides and stretched out into infinity, searching for the end of their love and never reaching it. His admiration for her was without bounds. The moment his eyes connected the space between his fragile body and hers, the glowing ball of matter that was The Angel awakened him.

Dean woke up.

He stretched, yawned, and rubbed the geometric dream from his mind. He tumbled down the stairs and then inched sluggishly back up, realizing he had forgotten to shut off the alarm clock. It wasn’t his alarm clock. It lived in the empty room across the hall from his, and it was the only thing still alive in there.

The wooden floorboards groaned as he stepped gingerly over them, reaching out and lightly tapping the top of the archaic metal clock as it buzzed frantically on the nightstand. It shook angrily, knowing it had awoken nobody, and screamed to fulfill its purpose until the firm hand came down upon it and silenced it.

Dean slowly scanned the room with his eyes, absorbing the limp bed sheets and the un-fluffed pillows that were eternally sinking into the mattress. The windowsill was lined in a thin layer of dust, and the light that streamed through the dirty glass illuminated tiny specs floating in the otherwise still air of the defeated and resigned space. The closet door was shut tightly and the doorknob stuck, but Dean knew the shelves and drawers inside were all empty. Though lamps and photographs in frames still sat stagnantly on desks, he knew that the insides were scooped out and tossed long ago. The room down the hall from his was like a tactfully gutted fish.

He had preserved it with a sense obsessive desperation since the day his brother died. He stumbled in there every morning, shutting off the alarm that would never wake that little child again. He was sleeping too deeply to hear the trivial beeps now, but Dean never took out the batteries, and he hoped that one day when he stumbled into the room he would find the younger boy there, yawning slowly and rolling from the bed.

Cold eggs and lemonade were waiting for him on the breakfast table. In fact, the eggs were the only ones waiting for him, because his dad didn’t wake up anymore. He figured John was depressed; he couldn’t blame the man. If Dean hadn’t been a crippled cynic before the alarm clock started waking up an empty room, he certainly would be now. Thus Dean acquired the lonely practice of making breakfast before he went to bed, just to have it waiting for him when he woke up.

He stirred the lemonade by swirling it gently in the glass, watching as the pulpy chunks of organic lemon drifted through the lukewarm liquid. He thought about The Angle. Since his brother died, Dean had dreamt about The Angel six times.

In the dream, he always started in the same place: his brother’s room. The walls were covered with thin black lines, spreading out across the ceiling and seeping into the floor, as if he was wearing night vision goggles. The panes of the fogged up windows were thick and defined, the corners of the room were highlighted, and he felt as if he were inside an unsolved black and white Rubik’s cube. When he tried to walk, his feet drew lines behind him and his eyes planned paths before him. His mind surged in and out between different settings, from anonymous classroom to anonymous woods, but everywhere he went the lines laid themselves out, creating boxes and boundaries and splicing the world into little separate pieces all around him; and everywhere he went, he met The Angel.

She danced across the line he stood on. Her copper hair cascaded like a river down her back, becoming more blonde until it finally reached a rich gold before her waste. She never stood still enough for him to see if her hair really was a gradient of yellows, but the way the shades seemed to shift made him think it was just the rays of sunlight hitting her body at different angles that made her seem like a reflection in a puddle, morphing with every rippled of motion around her.

Just as the realization of her undying infinity hit him, he would wake up to the sound of the undead alarm clock and rub the image of the unbroken linear coffin from his eyes. He dreamt of prison break and always woke up in a cell.

The sidewalk was frosted gently as if the sky had spread the snow too thin on the earth and had run out of icing before it finished spreading cold over the ground. His over-ear headphones crushed his soft ears against his skin and his cozy black sweatshirt rode up past his hands when he didn’t push it down, exposing the first dark red cut on his feeble pale wrist.

Dean was weak and tired but his eyes bore into every high school face that he passed, and he chewed on the insides of his cheeks to hide the grin that inevitably came when countless people lowered their eyes in fear or confusion. He read analog clocks aloud in military time and believed that nothing could stand still because the world was constantly throwing itself toward some spot in the empty expanse of space or tumbling away from an invisible celestial hand that was reaching to pluck it out of orbit and crush its thin crust. At 17, he was the kind of uncool that transcended bullying, and people left him alone so they could cling to the hopes that when he died some tragic death they would not be to blame.

He walked on the edge of the curb for the whole ten blocks to his dimly lit and worryingly unventilated school. His thick black hoodie hugged his arms and he shoved his hands into his pocket. He ran an absentminded hand through his hair, ruffling a few stands and splaying it untidily. He liked looking messy; he believed in looking the same way on the outside as he felt on the inside. He slipped his headphones out of his ears as he pushed open the front doors of the building, giving the freshmen mingling in the commons a taste of the Sex Pistols. His eyebrows instinctively rose as he met their eyes, and he gathered that classic rock was not their forte. He picked a rivet in the white tiled floor and followed it, shuffling his feet and letting them swing but making sure they always landed on the path he had picked for them. Cautiously, his eyes scanned for The Angel.

~

Pencils scratched, legs shifted, people coughed and laughed and sniffled- he could take no more of it.

In Dean’s mind Lawrence, Kansas, was one of the most unfortunate towns in the entire useless state. The buildings looked like miniature cardboard boxes from some mismatched Christmas town set made in the 1950’s. The paint was peeling off the sides of all the tin doors of convenient stores and the little square town shuddered beneath the shadow of the monstrous snow-capped mountain extending toward the empty cloudless sky, stretching the purple earth on up with it. None of the buildings stayed the color of wood or brick- they had some undying need for pastel, making the town hall look like a faded Rembrandt full of lilac, peach eggshell, and muted emerald. He wanted nothing more than to squeeze the color out of the suburbs like a piece of fruit and then drown it in black paint.

Lawrence Regional High School was a small rectangular red building adjacent to two fields full of artificial grass and spray-painted white lines. Thick wooden fences cut the fields off from Main Street, and twelve big oak trees clustered behind the science building, creating the Lawrence Tiger’s forest. When the days got warm, the big football stars lit up joints and talked about the cheerleaders they wanted to date next.

All the classrooms looked the same: harsh white lights and classic plastic desks with blue plastic chairs. Dean liked to sit in the library. The chairs there were left over from the founding of the school, and their soft torn cloth and sagging cushions were comforting. They were the closest he got to hugs anymore.

He shifted his eyes around the room, watching each gaze drop down to the floor as he met it. He felt like he was swinging an axe and severing limbs from trees. He snapped human connections like twigs under his feet. He sucked the souls out of the possibility of communication and it filled him with a feeling of intense love for hatred.  
He scribbled etchings onto paper and grimaced in his bubble of isolation.  
I’m not sure what it means to be happy anymore. I do things to try to make myself smile a bit, or to feel less rotten inside, but no matter what I do, I’m angry that I’m wasting my time. Nothing makes me feel calm and nothing can convince me that I’m working hard enough. I’m just a little lost. He wrote the words without reading them, as if his brain was sending distress signals that his eyes refused to skim.

When he was in middle school, Dean loved potential energy problems. He obsessed over the idea that the rock on the top of a hill was simply bubbling with the potential of cascading down the slope, creating heat, creating friction, creating energy and life. He wanted to marry the idea that he could lift that rock from the ledge and kill everything that may someday be. He wanted to level out all the slopes and inclines of the world and wipe out every hope of free fall. Hope was dead for him, and with a sick desire he longed to pluck it from others.  
Thus he became addicted to breaking eye contact. When he was among others he felt the prickle of their eyes on his skin and was possessed by the urge to fend off those coy prying stares. He felt sick to his stomach when they would not yield. As a child he had looked for the two devilish eyes peering out from under his bed- not to assure that a monster wasn’t there but rather to stare it down if it was. His younger brother used to tug him away from the blackness and cry in fear that the monster of fiction and fear would devour Dean, leaving him abandoned and all alone. In the end, the monster got him, and Dean was left to ward off the eyes of strangers.

Today he felt a pair of eyes that would not lower, and he searched relentlessly for a few expansive moments for the owner of the unyielding gaze. Scanning the library, he soaked in Starbucks cups and calculus textbooks. He saw folded arms and lazy feet and eyes trained on words or faces. He settled finally on one lone gaze that had not wavered from the little lines peeking from under Dean’s sleeve.

The gaze belonged to a boy Dean had never seen nor expected to see in the library. With callous excitement Dean bore his dark eyes into those of the black-haired boy across the room. The bluer eyes lifted to meet his own, peeling themselves from the sanguine scratches Dean had not bothered to cover.  
The line connected between the two dualities. Seconds passed. The black-haired boy wrinkled his forehead and tilted his chin upward as if to ask what Dean’s endgame was, and as the opportunity to break a connection subsided into the creation of one, Dean’s green eyes fell to the ground, slain and defeated in their own twisted game. This was the first time Dean had lost.

Though his body was warm and pressed gently into the library’s oldest armchair, his mind ached with exasperation. Despite the pleasure of the badly lit interior of the library that resonated in stark contrast with the snow, which fell in rifts outside the window, he would gladly be cold and unwatched rather than the alternative. He packed his books slowly and tugged his sleeve down over his pale and torn flesh. He walked from the room with an urgency he barely understood. His expulsion from the inside of the building irked and excited him.  
He loved snowfall. The glossy layer on the roadside that morning was mildly intriguing, but the stifling silence of a real blizzard was more appealing to Dean than any sunset or ardent fireplace. As he settled outside on the high school soccer field, his back melted into the ground and he blinked the flakes out of his eyes, staring up at each little clump of condescended water rotating on its own trajectory only to fall to its death on his face and melt into a little puddle. He looked at the plethora of tiny dull gems that were melting away, and in a darkly sadistic way he was relaxed.

The snow dropped all around him, falling over his body just as it fell over the unfilled space next to him. The snow did not discriminate against an empty space, but it fell equally, covering everything all at once. The magnificent quiet wasn’t vacant. There wasn’t a lack of sound: there was a thick, suffocating silence.

The snowflakes melted and slid off his face and he remembered that even though his last class was hours ago, he could not go home. He could not make himself breakfast at night and fall asleep knowing it was going cold downstairs as it waited to face the sunrise. He snarled at kids with preppy haircuts and chuckled along with cynical rock music, and in those moments he did not remember the darkness spreading like a cancer within him, but at the end of the day he knew that he would face the next day as a lifeless shell with the warmth drained out. He was a fresh breakfast meal left out to rot. He was afraid to dream of the lines again, and he was even more afraid to wake up to the alarm that beeped to the dead. Every time he heard its shrill cadence, he knew long after he died, the clock would still wake up every morning and scream, and no one will be there to shut it off.

The ghostly buzzing of that clock faintly haunted his mind, penetrating the ever-silent snow that fell on the empty spaces and him all at once, and he tried not to cry, because he knew his tears were acid that would melt away his cheeks. The snowflakes sliding off his cheekbones were tears enough for that day.

~

The trench coat lay like a defeated corpse on the park bench, and on his walk home he stopped completely and contemplated it with a still and fixed gaze. He stared at it, mesmerized.  
The walk home was nearly over, and as he turned and squinted, he could just make out the dim light that seeped out from his house into the road. The snow on the ground had already turned into a dark paste, like the slush of a poisoned smoothie that some paranoid man had thrown on the ground. Dean swirled the sludge with the toe of his leather boot and frowned. The trench coat seemed to frown back at him.

The coat’s buttons were unpolished and dented. The beige cloth was beaten and scratched. It lay in a pile, falling upon itself, with a little lump of snow sitting on top of it, almost like the flag that nature had placed on its broken soul, conquering it. Dean brushed the snow off slowly, feeling the rough textile on his skin. Despite the harm done to its psyche, it felt smooth and gentle on his numb fingertips.

Dean knew he had to find The Angel from the dreams. He hung his head, ashamed, because he had never needed someone as much as he needed her. He admitted slowly to himself that as he walked home, before the snowfall stopped, he saw her figure in every mailbox and street sign, fuzzy and blurred by the angry weather. He had taken little steps toward the silhouette before blushing in despair and embarrassment at his desperation. He was afraid that this may be what he called Hope.

He thought he had seen her on the bench, but it was just the old coat, lying alone. The shadowy park receded into fog in the background of his vision, and he considered for a moment that he didn’t really need to go home. But then he remembered the alarm clock, and his duty to shut it off, and he shivered.

All at once he grabbed it.

With one swift motion he closed a decisive fist over the chilled fabric, sweeping it from the bench and stealing it from the looming cavern of darkness descending from the sky. He swung it around in a flourish as he turned toward home, and without slowing down he thrust his arms into the looming abyss of the two sleeves. It fell above his knees and hugged his body. The inside was coarse and warm, and he ran his thumb over the scratches on the right sleeve, remembering the deep scars on his arm in the same place. He missed the feeling of being held. He missed hugging his little brother’s frail body as the smaller boy cried into his shoulders, because he liked telling the sandy-haired child that everything was going to be all right. He longed for the days when his father would scoop them both in his arms and squeeze them tightly to his loving body. He could not remember the last time he had felt the warmth of another human being. He shook snowflakes from his auburn hair and breathed deeply, inhaling the tragedy of his abuse. He wanted to love the trench coat, but even as he wore it he could not shake the feeling that it belonged to someone else.

He threw his arms out in a wide arc, spinning, pivoting, and slipping on the melted snow that sank into the cracks of the pavement to hide from tires of cars racing home. He shouted at the sky. He screamed a sentence and felt it ring out across the empty street.

When he reached the steps of his house, his stolen pockets were full with his hands and his shoulders were sinking under the weight of snow and sadness, but the words still hung in the air around him.

'Find The Angel.'

~

Dean laid alone, his head resting on the stolen trench coat, searching for the shapes of angels in the leaves that spread out in the trees above him. He was hiding from home again. He did not want to face his father’s sunken eyes as she fumbled for normality in the commonness of dishwasher soap or window cleaner. His father was a burlap bag that had been turned upside-down and emptied of its purpose. Dean and he both knew that no amount of household chores could wash the grief from the forefront of his conscience, and when he watched his father try, Dean only felt bruised.

The sun had gone down but the darkness had not yet fallen, and he breathed in nature’s hesitation to change. The snow had disappeared overnight. His head twitched as the leaves beside his body crunched under the weight of footsteps, but he did not look up yet. He waited.

“Hi.”

The boy from the library plunked down next to Dean, and the latter looked up with a prickled sense of dissatisfaction. “Original.”

“What?”

Dean shook his head and brushed the question away, focused only on the icy blue stare that even now was unflinching. “Have you come to gloat?”

“Nah. What’s on your arm? Cat scratch?” The blue-eyed boy was sitting cross-legged next to Dean, peering down at him sprawled vulnerably out on the grass.

“I don’t have a cat,” Dean purred.

“Oh. Did you fall?”

“You wish.”

“I’m sorry,” the other boy murmured. His utterance revealed that his speculations were not real questions so much as faint hopes for a world less complicated. After a moment he offered, “I’m Castiel.”

Dean stared up at his eyes. What he had first thought was a flat blue turned out to be a spiraling fractal of muted spindrift and solid blocky azure, like the sky in some outdated flash game. Icy chucks of tundra gave way to sea foam and finally blurred to the dark blue of the deepest parts of an ocean as all the spirals collided into the dense black of pupil.

“What were you doing in the library?” The question had been poised at the tip of his tongue since Dean had first seen the boy beside him in the gradually fading light of early winter.

“Yesterday? I was writing a poem.” Castiel shifted his legs underneath him, uncomfortably half-committing to the damp ground of the faux-woods behind the science wing of the high school.

“It seemed to be taking a while there, Castiel. Was it a haiku?”

  
Castiel brushed off the jab with a playful nonchalance in his eyes, but something in his expression resonated seriousness and poignant intrigued concern.

“I’ve never seen you before. You play football?” Dean pondered awkwardly, still absorbing both the uniqueness and the utter presence of such a character in his routine seclusion.

“No,” Castiel said quietly, and then, without missing a beat, “Why do you do that to yourself?” He asked the question elegantly and without hesitation, gesturing toward the torn jacket sleeves that covered Dean’s lines.

“Why not?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“My brother died.”

Castiel slowly slid down onto his back, mirroring the other boy’s posture and staring up at the cracks in the sky between the dying leaves. He cushioned his head with his hands and relaxed into the soft mulch.

“Would he have wanted you to hurt yourself like that?” he extended tenderly.

Dean let out a cry of rage and clenched his fists while he felt his whole body jolt as if he had been shocked. Something about this nonchalant blue-eyed boy in front of him made him want to crush the living soul out of someone or something near by. He shuttered and began in a shaking, pensive murmer.

“You wretched normal people keep trying to put out fires.” Dean spat on the ground beside him as panic flooded into his voice, “You do it because you’re terrified that your little perfect cities will go down in flames. Why can’t you just let them burn?” He sat up sharply, glaring at the boy beside him.

Castiel propped himself up on his shoulders and interjected hastily, “Sorry, it wasn’t my place-”

But the dirt-haired, forest-eyed, muddy-skinned ghost hiding under the scowl was already gone. Castiel sat back down under the canopy and waited for the stars to come out.

Long after he returned home, Dean still could not shake the memory of Castiel’s stubborn and demanding eyes boring into his soul. He had the audacity to ask about what his brother would want?

His brother couldn’t want anything now, Dean thought, and he rummaged through the cabinet by the sink for the little sliver shards that would severe the connection between him and the pain, even if it would only last for a little while.

It was only as he lay in bed that Dean remembered the trench coat. He had left it with the boy in the forest.

It had been returned.


	2. The Antagonist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's some more! Thank you all so much for the hits and stuff. That's so sweet. If you want to rant to me about the fic/give me some tips, my tumblr is minymilocat.tumblr.com. I've actually never written a fic before, so any advice would be super appreciated! Thanks, and enjoy the newly updated fluff.

Weekends were like prison if Dean stayed at home. His father would wake up on Sundays and try to go to church. Before the incident, he never went. He raised his sons as agnostic, and Dean thought it was weak to reward any fates or deities after what they did to his family. If some small part of him had believed in a god beforehand, it died with his brother and his mother.

On summer days and spring weekends he would go to the park and sit on the ground with his head resting on the concrete rim of the old fountain. He wrote sometimes, but usually he would just sit and remember, waiting for the days to pass.

But winters were harder. He loved to sit in the snow, but something about the world seemed more threatening in the shorter days. He was forced to face his loneliness. Dean felt very strongly that there was nothing wrong with feeling alone, but he wasn’t only alone- he was isolated. It was little things. He wanted to tell someone what he’d eaten that day or what song came on shuffle on his iPod. He wanted to hear insignificant details and put forth his own, so that maybe in that way he could make sense of the world. But again and again he found himself stranded. He was constantly walking through the halls or the sidewalks looking for a lifeline, but he refused to let anyone save him, because that opened up the potential for yet another person to leave. He was stuck in the void between a universe of craving love, alone, and a universe of shutting himself in, surrounded.

In order to avoid that painstaking conundrum, he felt forced to stay inside his house, trapped in a little box of loss with his father and the ghosts of their family. 

His father was a broken man. He had been strong and tall once, but when Mary died he seemed to shrink and age right there in the hospital room. His hair had been the color of rich, dark chocolate, but now it had the musty hue of a felled tree, torn from its roots in the ground and lying, lifeless and ready to be burned. The light in his eyes had switched off and the warmth drained from his arms. Dean thoughts sometimes that his mother must have been the only reason John Winchester ever smiled. 

Dean remembered that the soil was frozen and the gravediggers needed another day to bury his kin. The various odds and ends of the family and friends were already in town for the funeral and the house was packed with sticky silence and distant relatives wondering if it was okay not to cry. His father was fantastic for that extra day. He cooked and cleaned and made Dean smile through his tears. He was strong and caring for one last day, but once those bodies when into the frozen solid ground, he stopped being a father and started being guilty instead. His soul was lowered into the grave with Dean’s mother and her small, still child. John’s hugs felt bony and unconvincing from that moment on.

When he lost his mother and brother, Dean lost his father too.

John was a ghost and Dean was a demon. His father hovered around the house halfheartedly attempting to perform the actions Mary used to do with such maternal vigor, and he seemed to float right past Dean. They didn’t talk anymore. He paid for school and worked from home, sitting in his bedroom editing articles day after day. He left little packets of money on the kitchen counter, knowing Dean would get the groceries. Little by little their house fell apart. The downstairs sink flooded, the tiles on the counter were chipped and cracked, and Dean washed all the clothes in the sink because he was paranoid about the fiery smell that the laundry machine emitted. It reminded him of things. Out of all the deteriorating household appliances, he did love the absence of one. The toaster was jammed, and whenever he wanted toast, he would spread it out in the oven and keep the lights on, watching as it slowly heated up.

He was sad, but not broken. People never seemed to understand that being numb wasn’t the same thing as being devoid of everything. He still loved watching leaves fall in autumn, and music made him feel full with an inexplicable power. He fell in love the characters from books, and he liked to pretend that when he died he would meet Dostoyevsky and they would talk about depression and the apocalypse. He wasn’t falling apart any more or less than the average person. He was just tired, and angry, and very much so alone.

Sometimes he watched videos of marines running from one dusty sun-scorched building to another. He liked the way the grinned at each other silently, gesturing and shooting, united under the work they so firmly believed in. He would watch their shaky footage and wonder what he would do after he finished high school. College had been a given for him until the incident, but now he wasn’t sure. Whenever he thought past those four years, he shivered.

When he was younger, the doctor used to show him charts of his weight and height. There were trend lines that showed where he was and where he ought to be based on all the previous years of data they had collected. Sometimes, Dean sensed his life dropping off that predicted trend. Whenever he made a cut so deep that it made him afraid, he envisioned the path he was on now. Even though he understood that he could change his path if he tried hard enough, it scared him that if he didn’t start doing anything differently, he might die sooner than he could even dare to imagine. It was just a reflex now. Often, when he saw knives, he shivered at their silence and their horror-inflicted edges. When he did not shiver, that’s when he cut. And still he feared death. He did not like to admit that he was afraid, but he knew it in the pit of his stomach nonetheless.

But he knew better than anyone that you can’t choose when you die; you can only choose who you leave behind when you go. 

~

“Hey!”

The bell rang out across the crisp winter air as Castiel rushed across the field and fell into step next to Dean. With a sidelong glance, Dean examined the larger boy. His black hair was neatly trimmed, and it formed a spikey quiff above his forehead. Having been so fascinated with his eyes, Dean only just now noticed the faint brown freckles on the boy’s cheeks. His face was round and symmetrical, and he seemed to radiate healthiness and warmth. When Dean looked in the mirror, he felt sickly- his withered completion made him feel constantly reminded of his impeding mortality. But looking at Castiel was like looking at a painting. The prospect of such perfection aging seemed impossible. His cheekbones were high and defined and he wore a T-shirt despite the chilly winter breeze. His muscles rippled as he swung his arms. 

Before that day in the library, Dean had never witnessed Castiel’s oddly relaxed gait, but Dean knew this type, because Dean knew all the types except his own. So something frustrated him about Castiel. Though he looked the way Dean felt he ought to, his personality didn’t fit into his predetermined social hierarchy of teenagers; the only other person who didn’t was Dean himself. As Dean examined Castiel, the latter walked beside him patiently, awaiting a reply. Dean turned his head to this easygoing Botticelli boy and scoffed, knowing before he opened his mouth that what he told Castiel was different from what he told anyone, because Castiel was different.

“Y’know, I’ve got something about breaking connections. I don’t really talk to people anymore, because I’ve never found someone who understands things in the way that my brother did. When we were little, he used to tell me about how some day he’d catch up to me and be just as old as I was, and we could go to middle school together. He told me to wait for him to get a few years older and we could be on the same sports teams. I tried to explain to him that we would always have the same amount of years between us, because when he got a second older, so did I. He never understood it, though. I guess he was right, huh? I get older and he stays the same age. No one understands that. Everyone is so ungrateful for all the seconds that they keep collecting. People piss me off.”

Dean paused. He stopped walking and stared squarely at the other boy, who stopped walking and turned as well, still deep in thought. Dean’s forehead wrinkled and he squinted into Castiel’s crystalized blue eyes, shaking his head.

“I just don’t understand what you want from me.”

Castiel’s face seemed to open up. Every muscle looked at if it relaxed, and though he knew better then to smile, he could not keep the warmth from radiating through his skin.

“I can be your friend.”

Dean chuckled cynically, musing at the cliché utterance coming unexpectedly out of such a creature.

“I don’t have friends,” he retorted venomously. He started walking briskly across the field, wanting to be home, or away from such emotional turmoil as being on the receiving end of unrequited curiosity.

“Let me be your antagonist then,” Castiel called, taking a few running bounds to catch up with Dean. “Everyone needs an antagonist, and I don’t think it’s fair that you have to be your own.” Unwillingly his eyes slid down to Dean’s fist, which was clenched over the opening of his sleeve, sealing it from the air.

He shrugged and color started coming into his cheeks. He softly continued, “You can yell at me or whatever. I don’t really care.”

Dean felt sick. This transparency, the emotional expression, even the mere existence of human conversation, was too foreign, too rare, too honest for him to comprehend. He was out of practice. This childish, boyish candidness was familiar to him, but it was ancient. It was too much like his brother. He kept walking toward the fence at the edge of the field, wanting to hop over it and leave this- this ghost behind him. Ghost wasn’t the right word, Dean thought. Nevertheless, he did not mean to collide with such a complex being. He only wanted to collide with The Angel, and he couldn’t find her, but he certainly had not been looking for a sensitive jock with an interest in being antagonized for his benefit. This wasn’t on his terms. 

He reached the fence and placed his hands on it. It had once been painted white, but years of Kansas weather had slowly exposed the black metal underneath, and the spotted mix looked as if someone had poured white paint into a black can and swirled the mixture a few times halfheartedly, only to abandon both colors equally and torment some other colors instead. Castiel stopped next to him.

“Listen, everybody I know says you’re going to kill yourself, so they don’t really talk to you, because they don’t want to be in that classic high school reunion funeral setting where everybody feels guilty because they threw spitballs at you in sixth grade or something. So they just let you run your course I guess. I think that’s bullshit. Not doing anything is just as bad as trying to hurt you, and even though they’ll feel all good and guiltless about themselves, they’ll be just as much to blame in the end. I don’t want to be guilty, so I’m going to help you. Maybe then no one has to feel like they messed up. Whatever you need, just ask.” He hung his head awkwardly and twisted his mouth to one side of his face, glancing up every so often at the shaking figure before him. After a few seconds of silence, he quietly added, “I have to go home now. I’ll see you around.”

He waited for a few more moments, sighed, shrugged, and trotted off towards the other side of town. Dean hopped the fence and ran home, pushing away every thought that came into his mind with an intensity and focus that terrified even him.

~

His lips quivered as he walked past the little square boxes on Main Street. He shuffled across the uneven, bumpy pavement. It was sloped and cracked under his feet, and as he pushed himself up the hilly road he was constantly reminded that when he was younger he used to gape at the mountains looming over Lawrence and feel frozen in his own feet. His brother just used to smile at them. He had smiled at everything.

Sometimes Dean felt like he could only see the beautiful parts of the world through the rear-view mirror of a car flying down the pot-holed and pockmarked road away from beauty. He could only appreciate the rich reds and oranges of the fall or the looming purple mountaintop above him in fragmented pieces of broken glass or the dulled reflections of store windows, and only when they were behind him. Consciously or unconsciously, something in his mind forced him to ignore beauty until he was too far away from it to experience it firsthand.

After the encounter on the field yesterday, with his hand pressed into the fence, forcing splinters into the creases of his fingers to stop his body from shaking, with Castiel telling him he did not want to watch him die…. Dean had run home with the clearest mind and the heaviest heart, and he did not pause as he walked through the door and up the stairs. He shed his backpack like an old layer of skin in the upstairs hallway but he did not hear the thud it made as it hit the ground. He locked the bathroom door because he liked to pretend sometimes that someone would try to come in and stop him. He knew no one would.

His leather jacket fell to the cold tiled floor in a flurry, like heavy snow. He slipped off his shoes and tossed them in the corner of the bathroom. He felt the cold floor through his thin socks and curled his toes against it. The drawer with the rolled up silver blades in it squeaked and groaned as he forced it open, quickly, desperately. He shook with violence and honesty that only surfaced when he opened that drawer.

He pulled out the blades.

His rolled up sleeve sat tightly on his upper arm, squeezing slightly when he tensed. With his right hand he turned on the warm faucet and watched the water cascade into the cracked olive sink. He unrolled the paper and let the blades fall with a clatter onto the granite sink, eying them. All this time his let arm lie patiently, wrist up, on the countertop. Waiting.

He squeezed his eyes closed as he held one blade under the warm water. Minutes passed. Finally, he picked a spot amidst the old scars and new scratches, and he dug one edge of the glistening razor deep into is skin. He started seeing stars as he made his way to the other side of his wrist, and as he lifted the blade and watched it descend again on his rough skin, he whimpered.

Dean knew his tears were poison, but he cried anyways.

He slept that night with his arm wrapped in a white t-shirt, and he washed the stains out in the kitchen sink on Tuesday morning. He did not see Castiel that day. 

~

On Wednesday he found himself searching the hallways for the midnight-haired boy with the clear eyes and the warm face. He walked around the library twice, checking aisles of books for the eagerness and honesty of that face. He wore a black hoodie under his jacket, and he kept the hood pulled over his head, tugging it down over his forehead as he walked. He was not the boy who looked for people- no one else could know. In the end Dean gave up and sat with his back against a tree in the so-called forest with his headphones in. He began to think about trust, and its pointlessness, and how the world appeared to have an affliction for toying with the people who were already victims. He raised his face to the white sky and hissed between his teeth, but his anger subsided out of weariness and he faced it without sympathy or guilt. He merely watched it in its swirling whiteness and wondered how something could be so empty and yet look so full and content. 

When he looked back toward the earth he found Castiel sitting with his spine pressed up against the tree across from his own. He slowly popped his ear buds from his ears. Castiel was watching the dead grass poking through the leaves as it slowly rocked back and forth in the wind, and as he kept watching it, he began to ever so slightly sway with it. He grinned more widely with every sway until he finally let out an audible chuckle, ran his fingers through his hair, and looked up at Dean.

“I joined the football team today. I thought to because when you first met me that was what you asked. Lawrence won. We’re kind of undefeated.”

Dean studied him, unsure of what to say. When he finally spoke, his voice came out hoarse. “Was it loud?”

“Yeah,” Castiel grinned. “Deafening. When you’re under those big lights, and you hear the buzzer on the scoreboard and that sound gets drowned out by a thousand parents and kids and brothers and sisters and friends, and they’re all screaming ‘RAAHH’ and you throw up your hands and they scream louder. There’s something godly about it, y’know?” 

“Huh.” The sound escaped the Dean’s lips involuntarily. He twisted his legs up closer to his body and rested his chin on his knees.

Suddenly he felt tired of trying so hard to be jaded. The look in the other boy’s eyes and almost felt like he could trust the kid. He pushed his curtness away and adorned a more inquisitive calmness for the moment.

He looked up at Castiel and muttered, “I guess I’d like to feel like that too.”

The blue eyes focused back on him and he rubbed his hand across his face tiredly, but he was smiling. Dean had noticed that Castiel was the only person who really would smile around him. Even his teachers would wipe their usual smiles from theirs face and put on a newer, sadder, weaker smile. Dean knew it was out of a respect for his hurt or a fear of his alienation, but if felt good to see a smile like Castiel’s again.  
“You should read-”A yawn split Castiel’s sentence and he squinted as he wiggled against the tree, continuing. “-This poem by Gertrude Stein… it’s amazing. I woke up in the middle of the night with this dream about it. It was unreal.”

“Are dreams ever real?” Dean asked him. He thought a lot about the vividness with which he dreamed. For years he had been convinced that he never really did dream- he only sleepwalked in a different reality. But as he got older he began to realize that the notion of anywhere other than here, in this big empty universe, was pure wishful thinking. He was so familiar with escapism that it didn’t fool him anymore. No matter how bad things seemed, they couldn’t get any worse and they couldn’t get any better, because the way things were at any given moment was fixed. Memory warped the past and the present changed the future, but nothing could possible sway the events in the very moment when he lived, and, though suffocating, Dean found that thought very comforting.

Castiel thought before he answered. “Yeah. Some dreams are so vivid that you’re sure they’re really happening right up until the moment that they end.”

“What if our concept of being awake is really just a long vivid dream, and dying is waking up? Would you still be afraid of dying?”

“I never said I was afraid of dying,” Castiel answered. His voice was always level and clear, and his face never flinched when whipped by the frozen wind chill. He seemed to be perpetually living in a warm summer day, healthy and glowing, calm and content.

“I have dreams that are so real they feel like real life, and waking up from those feels like dying,” admitted Dean. It felt good to say the word alone: dreams. He had kept The Angel’s message sealed inside a bottle for far too long, and uncorking it felt liberating at the least.

Again, Castiel thought for several moments, waiting until the lapse between their dialogues became only large enough to emphasize the difference in their speech. He would wait until Dean’s words hung around the forest and replayed in their ears, and then he would add his own stable voice for the trees to absorb. “What are the about? The dreams.”

“A girl. They started right after my brother died… Each one gets longer and clearer. I think she’s real, Cas, and I’m afraid to find her but I’m afraid not to look.”

“What’s she like?”

“It’s hard to say. I know she is an Angel even though she’s never said it, and she finds me in this box of lines I build around myself… I’m travelling forward on this one line and she dances across it. God, she’s beautiful. When she twirls across my path, it seems to bend in order to follow her, and even though her path only intersects mine once, my whole life gets redefined. When I’m in those dreams, I know things without asking, and all the scars on my wrists are gone. I need to find her. I need her to save me.” Castiel was watching him as he spoke, and he became horribly aware that he moved and spoke as if he were underwater, impeded by pain and sadness. He only noticed it because when Castiel moved, even when he just swayed with the wind and the grass, he seemed freer and more unchained than nature itself. Dean bristled in the sudden fear that he had just said too much.

With words that fell effortlessly from his mouth, Castiel replied, “If you have a dream that vivid, it means someone is trying to tell you something.” He paused, and before he could continue to add the rest of his half-formed cryptic thought, the shrill bell sounded faintly in the distance. Castiel stood up quickly and said distractedly, “I have to go.” He added on, quickly, as if to cover his tracks, “It’s AP Bio.” He smiled again and shouldered his bag, and he turned away, leaving Dean there in the forest alone, torn with the feeling of wanting to call out and ask Castiel to stay. Just as the blue-eyed boy was reaching the threshold of the forest, Dean could not hold himself back, and he yelled to him, “Hey, wait! What was the name of the poem?”

“Sacred Emily!” came the answer back, and Castiel swung around and walked away.

~

Dean slept through the chattering alarm clock on Wednesday. His father didn’t notice. He left the cold eggs on the table. ‘They’re not getting any colder than they already are’, he thought with an odd satisfaction at the realization. He flipped the collar up on his leather jacket and swung his black bag over one shoulder carelessly. He sprinted over the wet pavement to Lawrence High, and he missed his first period class, but he didn’t mind, because that night he had dreamt about The Angel.

Her hair looked like swirling caramel and her lips were cherries and peaches. She stood in all white at a train station, doing spins and flourishes on the edge of the tracks. As she spun she swung out her arms and smiled, and the entire grid of lines that Dean could not stop seeing curved and circled around her, as if she was the only being that could free him from his linear prison. She seemed to be twirling endlessly, but with one sweeping motion she stopped, her back to him.

The sound of bells and tracks shook the station, and Dean lurched, but she remained perfectly still, her hair and loose creamy shirt blowing in the artificial wind of the oncoming train. He wanted to yell to her but the words got stuck in his throat. The train was coming into view. She took a step closer to the tracks, balancing on the metal beam of the wooden pathway.

The lines around him vibrated and shook wildly, and finally with one last push he screamed, “You’re too close to the edge!”

She turned her head in one rapid motion and pierced him with her eyes. The train kept coming but the lines stood still, and the sound was sucked from the world all at once, and she vanished just before the train hit her.

He stood numbly as the train doors opened. He peered into the glowing compartment and braced himself for the floods of people, but the cabin was empty. The electric yellow sign flashed on above the sliding doors, and the bright blocky capital letters spread out across the screen: CHICAGO.

He involuntarily began walking, one slow footstep at a time, toward the illuminated train. Just before his foot passed over the threshold, he awoke in a cold sweat.

The image of her eyes was seared into his mind. Amidst the soft white of her clothes and skin and the rich, shifting brown of her hair, her eyes were a sharp blue. They were the blue of oceans and summer skies. They were the blue of ice and snowflakes in the sunlight. They were a blue he had already seen.

They were Castiel’s blue.


	3. Toast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean decides to pack up shop and head to Chicago in search of someone to rid him of his anxiety surrounding the death of his mother and brother. Castiel timidly attempts to tag along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ((This is still in the very beginning - keep in mind that we're only just past 10k! - so it's starting off slowly. There are some cute moments in there though.))

Dean found Castiel sitting in the library that afternoon. He torn a corner from one glossy page of his calculus textbook, leaned over a desk, and scribbled a messy sentence with a blunt pencil. He took a breath, clenched his jaw, and walked across the room. He handed the scrap to Castiel and started at him, challenging him to laugh or punch him to the ground and admit that it was all a prank from the very beginning. But Castiel took the paper and read the hastily written letters.

“I need to go to Chicago.”

The black-haired boy stared up at him with confusion. He began shoving his books into his backpack and looked up again at the grimacing figure before him. Heads began to turn. The gorgeous boy and the goth kid, talking? Judging by the number of stolen sidelong glances, Dean figured some bible listed this as a sign of the apocalypse.

“Chicago? Why?” Castiel mouthed. He shoved his laptop into the bag and looked up with a coy smirk, adding silently, “How?”

Dean shrugged sheepishly and motioned for the other boy to follow him. When the library doors clicked shut behind them, they faced each other self-consciously.

“I looked all over for you,” Dean told him. “I can never find you.”

“You were looking for me?” Castiel mused, surprised. He shot Dean a grin and pointed toward the ceiling. “I was on the roof. That’s where I hang out.”

Dean almost laughed. “Why?”

This time he was answered with a shrug and a self-explanatory one-sentence response. “No one else goes up there.” Castiel looked at the boy next to him, with his spikey brown hair poking out at odd directions and his ragged jacket resting over his slumped shoulders. “Want to go up there?”

Dean nodded, and they walked side by side toward the end of the second-floor hallway. Castiel pushed open the door to the fire escape and held it as Dean passed him awkwardly. They ascended the rickety steel steps, spray-painted coal black, and climbed to the concrete roof. The sky was as white as a blank sheet of paper covering the Earth, and Dean breathed deeply and slowly, feeling his chest rise and fall, inhaling the freshness. He felt as if he had risen high above the guiltless people who took their seconds for granted and shot him nervous looks. Castiel lay down in the middle of the damp concrete roof, his knees bent and his arms cushioning his head. Dean followed him, sitting down and spreading out his arms as he turned his head to his left. He admired the lack of obstruction on the gray concrete sea. Not a single barrel or generator sat on the expanse of emptiness in his field of view. He turned his head to the right and saw the one exception- Castiel.

Castiel muttered, “I know. It’s nice up here, isn’t it?” The look in Dean’s eyes was answer enough. Castiel looked up into the sun that hung in the bleach-white sky.

He pressed his lips together as he looked upwards, and he said more to himself than to Dean, “My dad always used to spit out all these proverbs. When I was little I would cherish them, but now I can only remember them in fragments.” Castiel rocked his head back and forth on the cement. “‘The earth has received the embrace of the sun,’” he recited. He blinked and said after a moment, “It ended in something about love, but I forgot it.”

He looked over at Dean. “What’s in Chicago?” he asked.

“The Angel.”

It was too silent. Castiel always answered. He would think about his words and place them carefully into the air, but he never ceased replying, and Dean had grown used to that. His head was tilted, resting on his bicep, staring at Castiel, who was staring at the sky. Dean loved silence, but he felt the weight of Castiel’s absence aching in his very soul. This was not the silence of a suffocating snowfall- this was emptiness. Dean rushed to cover it up.

“I had a dream again. I can’t explain it, but I know I have to go there. I know she’s waiting for me. I’m leaving on Friday. I’ll hitchhike when I’m closer to the cities, but I can walk too. I just thought I should let you know.”

Castiel chewed his lip. His face was bound up in confusion and some other emotion that Dean could not quite name. Finally the boy pealed his eyes from the blank sky and stared into Dean’s own. “You’re insane.” He said the words bluntly, and they cut into Dean with a severity he did not anticipate.

“I know! That’s the point. Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? I’m absolutely bat shit crazy, and I know in my twisted brain that she is the person who can fix it. My mom died when I was four. My dad is a shell of a man. And my brother… he’s gone too.”

The base honesty was back again when Castiel spoke next. “What was… how did he….” Dean let him struggle with the phrasing for a few more moments, relaxed by the normalcy of the question and the awkwardness with which every person in his life seemed to ask it. Finally the desperate boy turned and looked at him directly, his eyes pleading for some interruption from his stuttering.

“Fire.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry.”

Dean wanted to say something then; he really did. He wanted to say, “It’s okay,” or, “It was a long time ago.” He wracked his brain for some comprehensive generic statement that would soften the tension in his companion’s contorted face, but there was no phrase that could sum up years of unresolved suffering. So he just shook his head. Maybe Sammy had died with his mother that night, things would have been different.

Hospital beds and tubes hooked up to clear liquid flashed in and out of his mind. He remembered tousling the sandy-brown hair and making little comments through clenched teeth about how he would be there no matter what; he was the big brother, and he wouldn’t let anything go wrong. He remembered the room with the vending machine that spit out packs of Oreos- he used to sneak them to his brother when he first got to the hospital full of whitewashed walls and the bright lights and the metal rods around all the beds. But most of all he remembered the broken little figure in those big white covers. That little figure with the burns and the scars. In the end his little brother had been the wrong kind of small. He wasn’t the kind of small that would grow big someday. He had been the kind of small that kept on shrinking, and finally he shrunk so tiny that he just stopped existing altogether. Dean recalled all those details, but he hated to remember.

On the day the doctors told Dean his brother would die, his little brother looked up at Dean and gave him a weak smile. Dean held his hand and told him he was sorry, oh god, so sorry he had broken his promise. Through all the hours between the fire and the slow and steady descent of his younger brother’s health, Dean had been telling him he would protect him. Dean refused to cry in front of his brother, but on that day, with tears falling from his eyes, he looked at that tiny little face and all he could do was ask, “Are you scared?”

Those big wide eyes blinked up at him and the raspy voice uttered the words, “No, it happens to everybody sometime.” The little boy was not solemn and he did not cry; he spoke those words as if he had discovered a truth that the universe had been trying to keep from him. “It’s all the same,” he said, and he smiled again, and he told the doctors he was sleepy, and Dean’s father tugged on Dean’s hand and led him away, past the room with the vending machine and past the white doors with the red signs, and they walked right out of the hospital and left the little boy behind. He died in a hot sweat from fever and from unhealed wounds that never got the chance to try. From that moment on Dean vowed not to cry, because his tears were poison. When he heard the news, Dean felt like a wet towel being squeezed and twisted until every last drop was forced out of his wrinkled and damp soul. He had no more tears left to spill.

He never should have cried that day.

“You okay?” Castiel’s voice brought him back again. Dean sat up and crisscrossed his legs, resting his elbows on his boots. He hung his head in his hands and closed his eyes. “I’ve got to go to Chicago,” he repeated, “And I just wanted to let you know before I left.”

“When? Friday?”

“Saturday morning. I need to pack.”

“Can I come?”

Dean lifted his head from where he had laid it dejectedly in his hands. His eyes were windows to pain and mistrust that Castiel could not comprehend.

“I said I’d help you with whatever you needed. We can take my dad’s car or something…. It’s energy efficient.” It took only a glance to see that Castiel’s snide comment slid right off the shaking boy.

“You don’t understand,” Dean said, tugging at his sleeves. He stood up and began walking to the top of the fire escape. When he reached the steps, he looked back, half expecting Castiel to come running after him. But the dark-haired boy just lay on the cold rooftop and stared at the white expanse creeping out on all directions above him, thinking.

~

During every class after their time on the roof, Dean’s skin tingled and his body felt as if it were falling endlessly, but he was too numb to scream and too afraid that no one would hear him if he tried. He always had a good understanding of his mental health: depression seemed to be in an ardent love affair with art, and Dean was no stranger to either. But in the few weeks after the fire, when people still cared about how he felt, he maintained the mantra, “I’m not depressed; I’m just lost. I’m not suicidal; I’m just dying.”

As he strolled down Main St. in the dark after school, he passed Jorge’s Used Books and walked almost to the next block before he turned back toward the boxed up building. He knew the feeling washing over him- itchy wrists, a twittering nervous feeling in his stomach, and a detached resolve… he knew if he went home now he would be unwrapping the tattered paper towels in the cabinet. When he stepped into Jorge’s room, the older man looked at him with his usual melancholy. His mocha-colored skin glowed in the light wafting from the warm lamps, and his eyes glinted in surprise when Dean came up to the desk and asked him for a book. Jorge had known Dean for years, and for all those years they mutually understood that shared and untold suffering was as powerful and therapeutic as conversation. Jorge let Dean use his library and Dean remained eternally grateful. There were no questions asked. Jorge couched cumbersomely and disappeared into the back of the store, where presumably even more books resided. He handed a dusty green hardcover to the tired boy, remarking, “I’m no librarian. You’re lucky I know that one,” and watching Dean to see if he could help him any more. Dean rarely asked for anything more than the room, and sometimes it unsettled the old storekeeper.

Dean plodded home with the book wedged under his arm. When he got home, he walked up to the second floor bathroom and locked the door behind him. He spread a blanket into a comfortable padding in the empty corner of the bathroom and examined the emerald book. It was not the color of the muted pastel buildings in the town square. It looked and smelled like evergreens, and it was rough and unrestrained, like nature itself. The pages were crisp and the little black text was dappled across every page. Dean ran his fingers over the glossy ink and then over his riddled skin. He flipped to the table of contents and scanned for one title.

He read it once and sat quietly for a few moments; then he read it again, and again, and again, memorizing every word. On the fifth pass he read it aloud, mouthing every word and absorbing every ounce of meaning he could find. He saved lines in his mind to quote later, and finally he unlocked the door and walked to his room at the end of the hall. He placed the green book beside him and shut the light, drifting to sleep with one hand wedged between the two evergreen covers, resting on the poem titled ‘Sacred Emily.’

~

Dean woke up from a dreamless sleep to the ghostly alarm clock on Thursday morning. He had two clear thoughts in his mind: one, he wanted to tell Castiel about the poem and about Chicago and how he was scared he wouldn’t find her and he was scared the alarm clock would ring forever and how he was scared of himself and everything, and two, he was very aware of the fact that he could not speak to Castiel in any way whatsoever.

He threw on his leather jacket and his torn jeans, hopping down the hall on one foot at a time as he pulled on his thin white socks. He tapped the alarm clock gently, silencing it, and he looked around the deserted space. He lingered there for only a moment before walked, eyes down, from the renovated room. Renovated. He feared the word. Why do people run from ashes? Sweeping them under the carpet doesn’t make them disappear.

As he ate his cold eggs he tapped his fingertips on the gritty table. He hummed to London Calling and shoved on his boots. He grabbed his black bag from the floor by the front door and slammed it behind him. As he walked in a steady clip to Lawrence High it occurred to him that today might be the last normal day he would have. Friday was a transition day, a packing day, and a leaving-behind day. Saturday was takeoff, and for all he knew, Dean might never come back from Chicago. He could die there, he thought… or, even more unlikely, he might learn how to be alive there. Either way, he found it hard to imagine that he would find himself in the skeleton of a room with the fluffy blue bed sheets and the empty drawers again. He was leaving that behind. He was leaving it all behind, really- his father, his cold breakfast, his blades in their papery bundle. He was leaving behind the underground library. He was leaving behind Castiel.

He pushed his ear buds farther in and tried to forget.

The next hour found him sitting in the back of his English classic. He scratched an essay into a lined piece of paper and thought about the poem he reread over and over last night. A girl who was two rows ahead of him whispered into the senior English class, “What’s the date?”

“October 11th,” he said. He did not whisper. He did not hesitate. She swung around and gaped at him, because he was the kid who got straight C’s and never said a word. He was the kid who stared you down in the hallways when you tried to look at the little lines on his arms. He was the kid you avoided. He was not the kid who told you the date in a classroom, because he was not the kid who knew the date. He was the timeless kid floating in space. He was the kid they all expected to die at any time.

Even Dean surprised himself when he said it, because though he was not the fantastical being they believed him to be, it was true that he made a point not to write the date on his assignments. But today he knew, and he wasn’t sure how or why, but he knew.

The girl with the draping necklace thanked him quietly and they all went back to scratching their words from the textbooks back onto the pages for the teacher to read and spit back. Dean wasn’t the only one who knew it was pointless, but he was wiser than his classmates, because he understood words.

Hours later, he sat down on the weathered chair in the library and felt his body sink into its ancient hug. As his eyes slowly closed, his skin prickled. They bolted open again, and he surveyed the room, looking for Castiel. Dean scanned slowly and settled upon his prey, who’s muscled arms were bent over a history book. Castiel looked up and waved to Dean. He waved back.

Eyes turned. They dashed between the two dualities, sweeping over the punk boy in all black and the burly bulk of mass that was Castiel. They waited with baited breath to see what would happen, and just as they began to lose interest, Castiel’s armed gestured. He mouthed conspicuously, ‘Commere.’

Dean froze.

Everyone was watching him, he thought. Everyone cared. Everyone was waiting to see if he would allow himself to be lured across a room to make a real human connection.

But as Dean watched Castiel grinning and beckoning him over with his frantic, sweeping arm motions, miming silently, he realized that Castiel didn’t care. And if Castiel didn’t care, neither did he. He stood and walked over to the boy who triumphantly cleared a spot by his desk and nodded to an empty chair. Dean pulled it up and sat down next to him, grabbing a pencil and scrawling in the already marked-up textbook,

“‘Paper peaches are tears.  
Rest in grapes.’  
I liked the poem.”

Castiel nodded and contained a smile, scribbling back, “‘Egg in places’ is the funniest line in American literature.” Underneath, Dean’s reply read, “Yeah. Made me laugh.” Castiel’s eyebrows rose, and he looked excitedly at the boy leaning over the textbook with him.

“It did?” he whispered. “Good!”

A girl with a pixie cut shot the two boys a dirty look and whispered, “Cut it out. I’m trying to study.” Her outburst warranted a curt, “Shhh!” from a boy sitting in the middle of the library and typing figures loudly into his graphing calculator.

Castiel chuckled softly and wrote back, “Looks like we started a library riot. I have to go to practice soon. See you tomorrow?” Dean shrugged and shot a quizzical look in return, but Castiel was already packing up. He raised one hand in a discreet goodbye and walked into the hallway. Dean watched him go. He pulled the green book from his backpack and opened to ‘Sacred Emily.’ He read the poem again, faintly underlining the line Castiel had pointed out with the pencil he had left behind.

~

Dean skipped school on Friday, and after he shut off the ghost alarm clock he went back into his warm bed and slept until the chilly morning frost had long passed the part of Kansas that Lawrence was in. When he finally did wake up, he scraped his cold breakfast into the trash and made himself some warm food. He took a shower and began arranging plans and items for the trip.

He emptied out all the books from his black bag and shoved his father’s latest paycheck into the smallest pocket. He added the book from Jorge’s shop, his headphones and iPod, and an outdated digital camera. He took a leather-bound notebook and a handful of pencils, and he stuffed his soft hoodie and a hat into the bag as well. He placed the bag by the door and stuffed some extra money in his pocket. He was about to head to the store to grab some supplies for the trip, but his hand nudged the doorknob and he felt it stick. As he pushed, it seemed to turn in the opposing direction, sliding against his hand. That’s when he heard the voice.

“ _Don’t go._ ” It was deep and genderless. It seemed to come from every direction, attacking him from all sides.

“ _Don’t go._ ” It whined and groaned. Dean took his hand off the knob and stood with his back against the wooden door, searching wildly for the source of the voice. He considered calling out to it, but his throat stuck. It was the same feeling he had dreamt when he tried to warn The Angel about the oncoming train, but he knew he wasn’t dreaming this time- or he thought he knew. He remembered Castiel telling him that some dreams were so real that you only realized they weren’t when you woke up, but he could not remember what he had replied. The sharp call came again.

“ _You can’t escape them, Dean._ ” It was a violent croak, threatening him or daring him- he could not tell which. He wracked his brain, trying to place why this disembodied voice seemed so familiar. His hands were shaking, and three of his fingers were still clinging to the jammed doorknob. He let out a cry.

“Who’s there?” he whimpered, and the voice that came from his scratchy throat was the same one as the voice of the intruder. Dean shrieked, knowing all at once that the door was not locked and the voice was in his head. He spun and turned the knob, rushing out into the street and away from the sad little house. He knew that even if he could run away from Kansas and he could run away from home, but he could never run away from his thoughts- but he sprinted down the road anyways, and he did not slow down.

Instead of going to the grocery store, he stopped in the little park on the way to school. He sat on the ground, head resting on the stone fountain, and he watched.

The trees swung gently all around him. The wind flowed around their thin branches like water, gently and relentlessly. His heart rate slowly gradually and he exhaled deeply into the cool air. The leaves seemed to breathe too as they swayed and swung, and everywhere around him things seemed to be falling. It wasn’t the kind of falling that wrenched your gut up into your head. It wasn’t falling after jumping. It was a relaxed, easy fall, almost like floating resignedly down to the soft earth. He wondered if that’s what happened when you died. Maybe it didn’t have to be an unquestioning human resistance to the race that ultimately tossed everyone off of the cliff of life in the end…. Maybe he didn’t have to struggle as he fell through the air toward the ground. Maybe if he just let go, he could float, and the ground would welcome him softly like it welcomed the leaves and the trees. The wind would sweep him up and guide his fall. People were so concerned with being remembered once they’re gone, but Dean just wanted to know that whatever was on the other side was going to want him.

The bubbling fountain was a cheap plaster remake of an emaciated lion, only a fragment of one magnificent Bernini that lay in the clustered Roman Piazza Navona. The lion’s eyes were wide and blank, and his jaw was hanging open, exposing its sagging tongue and it bent down the drink from the humble circular fountain. Its ribs were visible and its mane was tangled. Dean liked the Lawrence version much more than the original, because the arch-backed lion which was sipping from the clear blue water always had leaves or snow resting on its head and back, making it look as if it could not stand and walk away, and it was forced to sip the penny-filled water for perpetuity, a feline Atlas of the Kansas woods.

He watched the birds soar high above the mountains that loomed over the little town. He always thought that when people lived in a place for their whole lives, the things they grew up around seemed commonplace. But he would never get used to the mountains. They hung in the air like titans, serving as nature’s constant pillars that taunted the town, saying, “Anything you can build, I can build higher.” People and towns and cultures and species came and went, but, despite countless beatings by the rain and snow, the mountains remained.

Dean was mortal, and he could not stand being pelted endlessly with raindrops and hail. Every drop that life threw at him bit away at his very essence. He was not Bernini’s crouching lion who stood in his place despite whatever pushed him downwards, because he could only take so much before he crumbled and fell into the ground.  
All he could do now was hope that when he landed the impact would not leave him as broken as the journey had.

~

He walked to Jorge’s after he got some portable nonperishables- mostly canned food- from the grocery store. When he walked up to the desk and told Jorge he was leaving, the panic on that pudgy and kind face almost made him want to cry.

“That’s not what I meant. I’m just going to Illinois,” he had explained, feeling a little hurt. He thought about what Castiel had said. Something like, ‘They let you run your course.’ It made him ache a little, but he looked up at Jorge and thanked him for the library. He said he could return the book on the next morning, but Jorge shook his head and shoved two more old books with weathered spines into his hands. One of them was a deep purple and had a golden ‘S’ inscribed on the cover. The other had a cursive note inside, and when he opened it, he saw 1984 printed on the cover. Jorge gave him the usual melancholy half-smile and said in his calm voice, “I hope you find what you’re looking for- or outrun what you’re hiding from.” He dropped his eyes, worried he had said something wrong, but Dean returned the almost-smile.

“I’ll see you around, Jorge,” he uttered, and the little brass bells on the door almost drowned out the goodbye. He walked home with the books and groceries in his arms, thinking about his own growling voice ringing around him that afternoon. When he got home, he fell asleep immediately after storing away what he had gotten. He did not dream.

~

He awoke to banging and blinked rapidly, disoriented. The frantic trill of the ghost-clock was not playing. Just as the panic began rising in his throat, he heard it again: a loud, decisive knocking. He tumbled down the dark stairs and opened the door, not thinking fast enough to be afraid.

On his doorstep, hugging his arms to his side under the chilly starry Kansas night,was Castiel.

“What’s going on? Isn’t it 2 a.m. or something?” Dean rubbed his eyes and glared at the intruder with sleep-filled annoyance.

“It’s 10:30… were you asleep? Sorry.” Castiel was in a faded blue T-shirt that had a picture of an outdated Tarantino movie on the front. Castiel shifted and rubbed his hands together, and then breathed on them in a feeble attempt to warm them up.

“How did you get here and why the hell did you come?” Dean asked him, tiredly and somehow still with his usual hostile mistrust.  
“I took the spare car, and I just wanted to hang out. I couldn’t text you, and your school email hasn’t even been activated.”

Dean frowned at his feet.

Castiel gave him a wide, sheepish grin. “Y’know they sent out a memo about that in your freshman year. We’re seniors… you should totally get around to that soon, man.”

Dean twisted his mouth into an odd bunch at one side of his face in order not to laugh. He saw Castiel’s breath fogging in the air around him, and he stepped aside a little, letting him in.

Seeing Castiel in his house woke Dean up in an instant. Even just seeing another living person in the secluded cave of a home was shocking. Since his phantom father did not count as a viable life form in Dean’s mind, he had been alone for years. Seeing another living, breathing human being in his consistently empty field of view, let alone one as unexpected as this grinning clean-cut boy, Dean was almost knocked off his feet.

Castiel shivered as he examined the sad room. All the chairs around the table were pushed in and covered with a thin film of dust- except one. Dishes were piled in the sink and all light bulbs which were not yet dead were flickering desperately, ready at any minute to snap out with one bright flash, only to go dark again for good. The toaster was ashy and smudged, and the handle was left at an odd, bent angle, making it clear to the onlooker that it was broken.

Castiel took all the obsolescence and inglorious wreckage in without judgment or scorn, and his clear eyes did not squint in sympathy or disappointment. His gaze finally rested on the packed bags lying by the door, and he asked lightly, “You’re really heading out tomorrow?”

Dean had not expected him to bring up the trip. Dean hadn’t expected to see him again at all. He stood by the open doorway and looked up at the night, at the row of dark houses on the street, and at the lightly swaying pine trees at the edge of the darkness. Finally, when he knew he was not going to get an answer, Castiel gentle pried the door from Dean’s hand and shut it. He walked to a seat at the mahogany table and sat, dusting it off with a soft touch beforehand. He waited for Dean to sit down, and when he did, he smiled. “What’s up?” he asked.

Dean raised his eyebrows in condescending disbelief, and as he fumbled with the start of several harsh comments, he checked himself. Castiel rested his chin on his hand in a tired, sleepy, comfortable gesture. Dean settled finally on, “I don’t know. Want some toast or something?” He was not used to the lack of emptiness at the table, and being in company made him uneasy.

Castiel’s eyes lit up at the prospect of the infamous boy in all black with the dry eyes and the battle scars cooking him breakfast at half past ten at night.  
“Yeah,” he answered, and Dean grabbed two pieces of bread from a high up cabinet. As he walked toward the sooty oven, he explained with a noncommittal shrug that the toaster was broken. Castiel hadn’t even asked about the mess, or the broken appliances, or the lack of parents or pets or any sign of life at all, but Dean was all too conscious of what his own home must look like when compared to the clean-cut normalcy of everyday life. What puzzled him was why Castiel didn’t seem to care at all.

“So I’m guessing you don’t want to talk about the trip, right?” Castiel asked, inhaling a little while biting one side of his bottom lip.

“Not really. I’m going.”

“Okay.” Castiel watched as Dean laid the squishy pieces of bread into the top tray of the outdated oven. Finally, and much to Dean’s relief, he asked aloud, “What’s with the broken toaster?”

“I just don’t have the time to fix it myself. I don’t really mind.” He stifled a yawn again and rubbed his puffy eyes with his shirtsleeve. He realized that he was wearing his old soccer sweatpants and a loose grey T-shirt. Instinctively he turned away from Castiel, understanding that every old scar on his bare arm was exposed for this boy to see.

“Shit,” he muttered.

Castiel noticed how he pressed his arm to his side subtly but protectively, but he guessed the likelihood that the nervous boy wanted to talk about the scars was slim if existent. He had noticed the glaring scars from the moment he had opened the door, and in all honesty it was taking almost all of his energy to keep his eyes from staying glued to the bumpy red lines riddling the pale surface of his host’s skin. Instead he commented on the pile of books stacked next to the packed bag. “What were you reading?”

“Oh,” Dean said, shutting the oven and scooping the first book off of the pile, sliding it across the table, “Those were a going-away present from someone, I guess.”

Castiel nodded as he ran his big hands over the frayed cover. “Orwell. I read Animal Farm, but I haven’t read this.” Dean stood awkwardly between the kitchen and the table for a moment before he sunk down onto the floor across from the oven, with his back against the cabinets next to the dishwasher.

There was quiet for the next few minutes as Castiel flipped through the book and Dean sat watching the frail slices of bread slowly burn and harden before his eyes. They both jolted into consciousness that they did not realize was slowly slipping away from them, startled by the clear beeping of the oven. Dean took out the toast and lathered it with a thin layer of butter. As he placed the toast on chipped china plates, he heard Castiel behind him. He turned and handed the bigger boy his plate and was yet again surprised when he sat down on the floor, cross-legged, facing the dark oven. Dean sat next to him, shyly realizing how lonely the lowly charred toast looked on the backdrop of the white plate that was snaked with spider-webbed cracks. He looked over at Castiel.

“Well, shit,” Cas was saying, his mouth sinking over the crumbly late-night breakfast. “This is good. I’m never using my toaster again.”

Dean felt himself do it again: the half-smile. He constantly saw it mirrored in the faces of sympathetic adults who did not understand, or in doctors, or people who came to visit his father once in a blue moon. He had seen it on the sad faces of distant relatives when they had come over to quiet Christmas parties, but no one visited anymore. The smile was riddled on every person who intersected with him. It was the sign of restrained sympathy, of respect or fear. It was the smile that had stared into the face of grief and now knew only how to yield. Even Dean himself was afraid to smile. It didn’t bother him so much anymore, because when you live in a world of half-smiles and worried eyes, you begin to forget what happiness looks like.

But he was reminded of it in Castiel. Castiel smiled with a fullness and vivacity that was unmatched in Dean’s mind. Maybe he had just forgotten what it looked like with time, but when Castiel smiled, Dean felt as if he was waking up, slowly and painfully, from a nightmare-plagued sleep. But when he looked around and saw the piles of dirty dishes in the sink and the scratch-marks on his fridge and on his arms, he fell back asleep, or slipped back underwater.

He remembered writing in his old black journal, sitting by Bernini’s remade lion in the park. He had written about depression, the elusive sickness that he never really could say with certainty if he had. He knew he had a feeling, which was dark and damp, and for all intents and purposes he called it depression, because if it wasn’t that then there was probably not a word for it. In his notebook he described the feeling as hearing his favorite song playing, loudly, and having it fill hum with excitement and bliss, but before he could open his mouth to sing the lyrics, he was thrust underwater. As he sunk deeper and deeper, his mouth filled with water and his gasps for air only made things worse. The chords and the melodies of the song were muted and suffocated by the gushing water all around him, and as he fell farther and farther, the song was blotted out all together and he turned away from the water’s surface to see that there was no bottom to the endless abyss he was floating into. And he could not swim.

When he talked to Castiel it did not feel like breaking the surface of the water and breathing in fresh air as the song hit his ears. It only felt like swimming, pushing the water behind him ever so slightly, and taking one little stroke back up to the surface. He had been sinking for so long that he was not sure he could make it back up anymore, but he liked to know that he could try.

Dean finished his toast and placed his plate on the ground, seeing that Castiel had done the same. He kneeled and reached up toward the counter, dragging down his iPod. He popped in an old headphone and offered Castiel one as well. Castiel took it and squeezed it gently into one ear without speaking. He was still looking through the book. Dean shuffled through a few songs by the Clash before settling on the slow and calming melody of Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. Castiel let out a satisfied laugh involuntarily and then breathed deeply, humming a little as the vocals started.

Dean sat with his knees hugged to his chest, thinking about The Angel and wondering what he would say if he found her. He was almost afraid, but he was too tired and too numb to process his fear. He instead let it sit in the back of his head, festering and ignored.

The little white cord of the headphones connected him and Castiel. He felt an unfamiliar feeling wash over him, and as he tried to pinpoint it, his eyes closed. The soft darkness on the insides of his eyelids steadied his breathing, and he fell asleep to Castiel humming to the smooth guitar, enveloped by the lingering smell of warm toast.


End file.
